Anyone who watches Dr. John Campbell's YouTube videos regarding the pandemic cannot help but adore and admire him.
His transformation from a believer in the "system" to using his pithy British mannerisms to cast not-so-subtle dispersions at all the "authorities" encourages us all.
The obvious corruption he illuminates in his videos has led him to take a deep and hard look at traditional medicine for the first time. Therefore, he and many newcomers to integrative/functional/root-cause medicine have a lot of baggage to shed and much to learn. I believe Dr. Campbell is fully up to speed on adequate levels of vitamin D. However, this is not the case for vitamin A - at least yet.
A case in point is his recent video on Vitamin A.
As usual, the facts he presents are solid. However, the comments he makes about the toxicity of vitamin A come more from his "past" medical life. Can vitamin A be toxic? A better question is, what can never be toxic, regardless of the dose? Nothing comes to mind, and that includes water. Dr. Thomas Levy argues that there is no upper concentration of vitamin C that is toxic, but taken into context, what he probably means is it is nearly impossible to digest enough to reach toxicity deliberately.
FYI, I am not worried about the relatively remote possibility of vitamin A toxicity in the 4-day "Brownstein" pulse. The benefits, in almost all cases, far exceed the risks. Those concerned about high doses of supplements should consider starting at lower doses and working up. life is all about adaptation. However, the organisms may adapt, too. That is why I promote the 4-day high dose approach as soon as practical.
As a side note, part of the reason for his vitamin A video was to address the mysterious rise in mycoplasma pneumoniae cases in china. I will address this in another blog. My belief is that "turbo mycoplasma" is akin to turbo cancer. It is already there and being accelerated by the spike/jab.
Keep in mind, very few test for mycoplasmas, so how do we know this is sudden or mysterious? If you run through my testing, you know we test for it in almost everyone. Also, we have interviewed Dr. Garth Nicolson, the world expert on the topic. I am saving this as its own blog topic because I will present case studies on how to lower m. pneumoniae. Interestingly, Dr. Nicolson did not talk about treating m. pneumoniae, rather he only addressed how to "mop up" the damage. When I asked him how to treat it, he referred to an antibiotic regimen for treating chronic lyme and other chronic bacterial pathogens. They work but the risk/benefit ratio is low (but positive!)
Back to vitamin A. Dr. Brownstein has treated thousands - and possibly tens of thousands of patients with what we refer to as the Brownstein protocol. One of the ingredients in that protocol is vitamin A at a dose of 100,000 IU daily for 4 days per month. I now have over 100 people on this protocol, including my children. I have heard no reports of typical vitamin A toxicity. What I HAVE heard is consistent rectification of severe and nagging health conditions.
There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs. Thomas Sowell
Is 100,000 IU of vitamin A, 4 days per month, a high dose? It certainly seems like a high dose when you compare it to, for example, 1 gram of vitamin C. But grams and IU are not the same, no more than a ton vs a pound.
RAE: Retinol Activity Equivalent.
Therefore, 100,000 IU vitamin A = 100,000 micrograms or 0.1 grams or 100 milligrams.
High-dose vitamin A and the saving of lives.
The Royal Brompton Hospital is well known for studies evaluating the use of streptomycin and other chemotherapy for tuberculosis (TB) in the 1940s to 1960s, but it is less widely known that the physicians at the hospital were already investigating treatments for TB 100 years earlier. This is a report of a study conducted in 1848.
Objective: to investigate the use of cod liver oil in the treatment of consumption (also known as phthisis, and now called tuberculosis or TB) in 19th century London Hypothesis: that cod liver oil might arrest progression or reduce the death rate from consumption (coughing blood tuberculosis!)
Protocol: the study was conducted in 1848 at the Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest, Brompton. The results were presented to the hospital’s Committee of Management in the First Medical Report of the Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest in 1849.1
Here is an excerpt from my book "Health Freedom Lost," Volume 1, regarding this study, cod liver oil, and tuberculosis.
Here is the daily dose of cod liver oil and vitamin A used to reduce mortality from "Consumption," a.k .a. end-stage tuberculosis in this 1848 study.
Low-end daily amount of vitamins A and D from cod liver oil: A - 10,000 IU; D - 1,000 IU
High-end daily amount of vitamin A from cod liver oil: A -126,000 IU; D - 13,000 IU
The duration of the study was not noted but probably continued for weeks.
Cod liver oil, with its natural mixture of vitamins A and D, is a treatment for TB. Since TB is a highly virulent pathogen, cod liver oil is not a cure but significantly reduces morbidity and mortality.
In a study carried out by physicians at the Hospital for Consumption in 1848 in England, 542 patients with the disease received standard treatment with added cod liver oil. These patients were compared with 535 ‘control’ patients who received standard treatment alone, without cod liver oil.92
The disease stabilized in 18 percent of the patients given cod liver oil compared with only 6 percent of those in the control group.
That, in relative terms, is a 300 percent improvement. This is what modern drug companies would claim.
However, in absolute terms, the real benefit was a 12 percent improvement.
This is impressive considering the most prominent drug class in history, statins, have an aggregate net of ZERO percent benefit.
Deterioration or death occurred in 33 percent of patients given standard treatment alone but
in only 19 percent of those given cod liver oil,
an absolute reduction of 14 percent. Today, the benefit of most drugs is given in relative statistics, so for the sake of comparison,
the relative reduction in deaths on cod liver oil was 74 percent.
Using either statistic, the improvement in health outcomes afforded by cod liver oil was impressive.
92 Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest. The First Medical Report of the Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest, presented to the Committee of Management by the Physicians of the Institution. J Churchill, 1849, pp. 31-41. 93 W
Dr. Campbell need only look to his own backyard for the surprising benefits of HIGH DOSES of vitamin A (and D)
In the video, Dr. Campbell correctly commented that Vitamin D enhances the benefit of Vitamin A and vice versa. As Dr. Carter and I talked about this today, we both commented that Dr. Campbell is 125 years late to be the first to draw that conclusion.
To avoid making this blog too long, I reference the study Dr. Campbell referred to, where vitamin A was shown to reduce both blindness and death in children in Asia.
** I hope you made the connection between eye diseases and mortality risk - because it is real if you follow my many blogs and videos on eye and whole body health. **
The work was directed by Alfred Sommers, an ophthalmologist and now chair professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School.
Now you know why Dr. Campbell is presenting vitamin A as a treatment for mycoplasma pneumoniae - an infectious disease.
Finding The Best Treatment
Sommer and his team then set themselves the task of demonstrating that
oral, high-dose, vitamin A supplementation
—a treatment tailor-made for developing countries since it does not require a sterile injectable preparation—could effectively, quickly, and cheaply treat the debilitating consequences of VAD. As a result, the World Development Report (World Bank) declared vitamin A supplementation one of the most cost-effective of all health interventions.
There is that word combo, Dr. Campbell - "high-dose."
When saving lives, dose matters - regardless of unspecified collateral damage risk.
I cannot find any reference to the dose given to the children but speculate that "high dose" means ~10,000 IU.
Another article on Dr. Sommers and the vitamin A project.
Alfred Sommer is surely the only eye doctor in the world who can truly claim to have saved millions of lives at a time. His pioneering work in studying vitamin A deficiency and blindness prevention has won him worldwide fame as well as the prestigious Lasker Prize, and saved the vision of children throughout the developing world.
In the early 1970s, Sommer, an ophthalmologist by training, was working in some of the poorest countries on Earth for the Epidemic Intelligence Service of the Centers for Disease Control. There he began to focus his work on a devastating, startlingly prevalent eye condition called nightblindness.
"A child who is night-blind in a village in India or Bangladesh or Nepal literally can't fend for him- or herself," Sommer explains. "While other kids are walking around the village or playing with toys, these children huddle in a corner."
Sommer saw firsthand the tragic consequences of leaving the condition untreated. "The children will go truly blind, because what happens is the cornea, that clear front of the eye, just melts away. And it can melt away in the course of one day." Millions of children were losing their vision permanently, Sommer learned, because of a simple lack of vitamin A in their diet.
Discovered in 1913 by nutritionist EV McCollum, vitamin A was one of the first essential "micronutrients" to be identified. One of its functions is to produce a light-sensitive chemical called rhodopsin in the retina, which allows us to see in low light. This is why carrots help us see in the dark, along with liver and dark green leafy vegetables like spinach — all foods that were missing from the diets of the children Sommer encountered.
Sommer was in a unique position to combine his expertise in ophthalmology with his training in epidemiology. "Epidemiology is medical detective work," he says. "It's solving who is the perpetrator of a crime. It asks three questions about a disease or an epidemic: when, where, and who?"
In the mid-1970s, Sommer went to Indonesia, where nightblindness was common, to seek answers to these questions and prevent more children from losing their sight. He and his team closely monitored 4,000 children to see which ones became night-blind.
He made a remarkable discovery when reviewing the data: The night-blind children seemed to be dying at a much higher rate than the children with normal sight. Could the vitamin A deficiency that was causing nightblindness also be making the children fatally susceptible to mild childhood illnesses like measles and diarrhea?
There was only one way to find out. Sommer and his team gave an oral dose of vitamin A to 10,000 children and compared them with children not getting vitamin A. The results were astounding: Just two cents' worth of vitamin A given twice a year reduced childhood mortality by a third. "We were absolutely elated," he recalls. "Suddenly you have a very inexpensive, practical way to save more than a million lives a year of young children, year in and year out, and prevent half a million children from going blind."
But critics dismissed Sommer's results as too good to be true, and he couldn't convince them that such a simple solution could save so many lives. "What was most frustrating of all was when you present the hard data and people just say they don't believe it. I mean, how do you deal with that?"
Determined to prove his case, Sommer and his team embarked on their biggest trial yet: Thirty thousand children would be involved, this time in Nepal.
The Nepalese results proved that Sommer had been right all along: Vitamin A could save children's lives as well as their sight. And the lifesaving power of vitamin A did not stop there. In another trial in Nepal, Sommer and his team found that giving pregnant women vitamin A supplements reduced maternal mortality by nearly 40 percent.
The World Bank has judged the vitamin A capsule one of the most cost-effective medical interventions of all time, and programs to dose children with it have now been rolled out in 70 countries.
Sommer is an eminent professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he has spent most of his career teaching. He and the school's major donor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York, were having dinner one night, discussing the goals of public health. Together, they came up with the school's motto: "Protecting Health, Saving Lives — Millions at a Time." It's also an apt description of Sommer's work and his commitment to public health.
Lastly, what is vitamin A anyway? Dr. Campbell referred to it as retinol (the "ol" indicates it is a complex alcohol). However, it is a mixture (as is vitamin D in its natural forms).
Vitamin A (A1; A2)
Vitamin A is found as such only in the animal kingdom and is particularly abundant in fish-liver oils.
Vitamin A occurs in three or more forms termed vitamers. Vitamin A1, retinol (see Fig. 31.1), is an alcohol and retinal is its corresponding aldehyde. Vitamin A2, dehydroretinal, has a second unsaturated bond in the ring system and also occurs as the aldehyde dehydroretinol.
The carotenes (see Chapter 24) are C40 compounds found in the plant kingdom and are converted to vitamin A in the small intestine and other organs. Although the formulae of the carotenes might suggest that each molecule would give rise to two molecules of vitamin A, the successive oxidations of the molecule in fact give rise to only one molecule of the vitamin.
Infants and young children have only a limited capacity to effect this conversion and true carnivores (e.g. cats) and invertebrate animals are unable to utilize carotene in this respect.
Vitamin A is essential for the normal functioning of the body epithelia and the retina. Deficiency is indicated by night blindness and by a drying and crusting of the mucous membranes.
For the chemists (only) in the group.
The End.
Index & Upcoming (short) blogs
Number 1: Cholesterol fun (true) facts - completed
Number 2: Is the actual cholesterol molecule important? c - completed
Number 3: What is an optimal TC value? Remember, no one knows their actual cholesterol molecule value. - completed
Number 4: Surprising fact about cholesterol as an antibiotic - completed
Number 5: TC simple math - dumb doctors - completed
Number 6: What is LDL really? - completed
Number 7: Statins - do they lower the cholesterol molecule? - completed
Number 8: What did we learn from the new "biologics" to lower "cholesterol"
Number 9: Niacin and other "cholesterol" management treatments
Number 10: What did Natasha Campbell-McBride say about cholesterol/lipids?
Number 11: What is a QALY, and how does it relate to "cholesterol"?
Number 12: Idiot doctor from Johns Hopkins, Roger Blumenthal
Number 13: Who says statins do NOT extend life?
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I am confused. If you are saying 1 IU = 0.3 mcg, then how can the following be true?
"Therefore, 100,000 IU vitamin A = 100,000 micrograms…"
Should it not be 30,000 micrograms, or am I missing something? And when you say 4 days per month for high-dose vitamin A, do those days have to be consecutive, or can they be scattered? BTW - I really enjoyed the story about Dr. Sommers. What an amazing individual. We need more of that compassion!